Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 115388 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115388 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 462(@250wpm)___ 385(@300wpm)
And then there was Zo. He’d been the one that I knew would truly give us some clues. But all he’d done was disappear into a podcast studio in Shibuya for over an hour. When he finally came out with two producers, they went to grab a slice of cheesecake and chat for another hour.
Even Reo—who could profile someone with three minutes of audio and a heartbeat—had come up empty.
“The friends are clean. Too clean. If they’re hiding something for her, they’re doing it at a level I’ve never seen.”
Reo wasn’t angry—he was impressed.
But I was aggravated.
My focus was supposed to be on the war and the cargo.
Chiba had gone off without a hitch. The cargo was offloaded to a fleet of decoy seafood trucks—ice-packed and swarming with the stench of mackerel, shrimp, and salt brine. No one questioned them. The labels were perfect, the manifests clean. Drivers stuck to coastal access roads and slipped through Tokyo’s east side undisturbed.
The warehouse they parked at was legally registered to a shell company under one of my wine distributors. The seafood smell masked the gunpowder. No one blinked.
Saitama was more complex but Reo had run the play like a symphony. The crates were split between two convoys—each made up of luxury vans registered to one of our front-facing escort services. Suits. Silk. Lipstick. Even the women didn’t know they were sitting above enough C4 to flatten six blocks. Each van had its own path into Tokyo, entering as if enroute to pleasure appointments.
Meanwhile, Reo’s men hacked the traffic grid to greenlight every corner.
Tochigi was the most delicate. The cargo traveled in weathered agricultural trucks, the kind used to haul rice or compost. Stamped with a farming permit tied to a fake company. The crates were wrapped in burlap and mulch.
They crossed into Tokyo’s outskirts just before dawn. My allies in the city council had made sure inspections were suspended for “soil health testing” that morning.
Everything had moved.
Perfectly.
Flawlessly.
And yet here I was… distracted.
Agitated.
Chasing a woman who knew how to make my entire crew pivot around a single unanswered question: Where the fuck is she taking me?
I went back to her guards and demanded a full list of every person she’d physically come into contact with over the last twenty-four hours—delivery drivers, neighbors, passing strangers.
Anything.
All checked out, there was only one anomaly.
One of the guards mentioned an older woman. She’d visited the apartment the afternoon before. Stayed twenty, maybe thirty minutes.
Had tea.
That was it.
When she left the building, she wore a veil made of lace. The guard swore he couldn’t make out her face—just a pair of narrow eyes and the soft click of a cane as she moved down the hallway.
No car picked her up.
No camera caught her coming or going.
She just. . .arrived and then vanished.
They hadn’t searched her. Had no reason to. She was slow-moving. Polite. Elderly. She even bowed three times at one of them, looking like someone’s grieving aunt, not a variable in an active operation.
But I knew better.
I told Reo to assemble a full team to track the woman down.
He refused, citing that it was now close to an hour before the date.
Pissed, I accepted my defeat, and he left to meet her.
Still, while dressing, I’d called Reo seven times to get the address.
He didn’t answer.
Which told me everything.
Nyomi had ordered him not to.
And Reo—my most trusted, my most disciplined, my coldest in command—had obeyed her.
I laughed out loud when I realized that.
Fucking Roar.
Did Reo not know exactly what kind of chaos he was enabling?
Regardless, I was impressed. Shocked, even. Reo didn’t bend easily. And never had he shown this kind of quiet respect for anyone I dated.
Until now.
My chauffeur moved us along.
I sat in the back with my fingers drumming along my thigh. The gift I’d gotten her in Paris rested beside me and was wrapped in thick black paper. A pink bow topped it.
I looked at the window and stared at my reflection. Charcoal Tom Ford suit. Open collar. No tie. Hair styled. Rings gleaming. The edge of a tattoo peeking just barely along my neck.
The steel-eyed gaze of a predator smiled back at me.
Tora, are you ready?
My body thrummed with the kind of hunger that bordered on dangerous. It wasn’t just arousal—it was a taut, animal ache that lived deep in my bones.
My cock had been half-hard for hours, pulsing with every thought of her—every imagined sound she might make when I showed up, when I stripped her of that smug, secretive power she’d been holding over me for the past days.
My jaw tightened.
My fingers flexed against the gift box like I was gripping her waist instead.
Every nerve buzzed every breath I took burned with hunger.
I didn’t just want to see her. I wanted to devour her—slowly until the taste of her rewired my insides.
Finally, I will know what your plans are this evening.